The Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Unconscious Emotional Responses

Excerpt

The neurocognitive mechanism of emotion without conscious awareness has long been a subject of great interest (Pribram KH, Gill MM, Freud’s “project” re-assessed: preface to contemporary cognitive theory and neuropsychology. Basic Books, 1976). Several pervious psychological studies have used subliminal presentations of emotional facial expressions in the context of the affective priming paradigm to investigate unconscious emotional processing (e.g., Murphy ST, Zajonc RB, J Person Soc Psychol 64:723–739, 1993; for a review, see Eastwood JD, Smilek D, Conscious Cognit 14:565–584, 2005). In a typical application of this paradigm, a facial expression depicting a negative or positive emotion is flashed briefly as a prime, then an emotionally neutral target (e.g., an ideograph) is presented. Participants are asked to make emotion-related judgments about the target. The studies reported that evaluations of the target were negatively biased by unconscious negative primes, compared to positive primes. This effect has been interpreted as evidence that unconscious emotion can be elicited and that it affects the evaluation of unrelated targets.